UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Fauna Europaea: Annelida - Hirudinea, incl. Acanthobdellea and Branchiobdellea Minelli, A.; Sket, B.; de Jong, Y. DOI 10.3897/BDJ.2.e4015 Publication date 2014 Document Version Final published version Published in Biodiversity Data Journal License CC BY Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Minelli, A., Sket, B., & de Jong, Y. (2014). Fauna Europaea: Annelida - Hirudinea, incl. Acanthobdellea and Branchiobdellea. Biodiversity Data Journal, 2, [e4015]. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.2.e4015 General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). 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Acanthobdellea and Branchiobdellea Alessandro Minelli†‡, Boris Sket , Yde de Jong§,| † University of Padova, Padova, Italy ‡ University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia § University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland | University of Amsterdam - Faculty of Science, Amsterdam, Netherlands Corresponding author: Alessandro Minelli ([email protected]), Yde de Jong ([email protected]) Academic editor: Christos Arvanitidis Received: 05 Sep 2014 | Accepted: 28 Oct 2014 | Published: 14 Nov 2014 Citation: Minelli A, Sket B, de Jong Y (2014) Fauna Europaea: Annelida – Hirudinea, incl. Acanthobdellea and Branchiobdellea. Biodiversity Data Journal 2: e4015. doi: 10.3897/BDJ.2.e4015 Abstract Fauna Europaea provides a public web-service with an index of scientific names (including important synonyms) of all living European land and freshwater animals, their geographical distribution at country level (up to the Urals, excluding the Caucasus region), and some additional information. The Fauna Europaea project covers about 230,000 taxonomic names, including 130,000 accepted species and 14,000 accepted subspecies, which is much more than the originally projected number of 100,000 species. This represents a huge effort by more than 400 contributing specialists throughout Europe and is a unique (standard) reference suitable for many users in science, government, industry, nature conservation and education. Hirudinea is a fairly small group of Annelida, with about 680 described species, most of which live in freshwater habitats, but several species are (sub)terrestrial or marine. In the Fauna Europaea database the taxon is represented by 87 species in 6 families. Two closely related groups, currently treated as distinct lineages within the Annelida, are the Acanthobdellea (2 species worldwide, of which 1 in Europe) and the Branchiobdellea (about 140 species worldwide, of which 10 in Europe). This paper includes a complete list of European taxa belonging to the Hirudinea, Acanthobdellea and Branchiobdellea. Recent research on a limited number of taxa suggests that our current appreciation of species diversity of Hirudinea in Europe is still provisional: on the one hand, cryptic, unrecognised © Minelli A et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. % Minelli A et al. taxa are expected to emerge; on the other, the status of some taxa currently treated as distinct species deserves revisiting. Keywords Annelida, Hirudinea, Acanthobdellea, Branchiobdellea, leeches, Europe Introduction The European Commission published the European Community Biodiversity Strategy, providing a framework for development of Community policies and instruments in order to comply with the Convention on Biological Diversity. This Strategy recognises the current incomplete state of knowledge at all levels concerning biodiversity, which is a constraint on the successful implementation of the Convention. Fauna Europaea contributes to this Strategy by supporting one of the main themes: to identify and catalogue the components of European biodiversity into a database in order to serve as a basic tool for science and conservation policies. With regard to biodiversity in Europe, both science and policies depend on a knowledge of its components. The assessment of biodiversity, monitoring changes, sustainable exploitation of biodiversity, and much legislative work depend upon a validated overview of taxonomic biodiversity. Towards this end Fauna Europaea plays a major role, providing a web-based information infrastructure with an index of scientific names (including important synonyms; i.e. alternative names still in use, or at lead found in recent literature) of all living European land and freshwater animals, their geographical distribution at country level and some additional useful information. In this sense, the Fauna Europaea database provides a unique reference for many user-groups such as scientists, governments, industries, conservation communities and educational programs. Fauna Europaea started in 2000 as an EC-FP5 four-year project, delivering its first release in 2004. After thirteen years of steady progress, in order to improve the dissemination of Fauna Europaea results and to increase the general awareness and acknowledgement of Fauna Europaea contributors, novel e-Publishing tools have been used to prepare data papers of all 58 major taxonomic groups (Jong et al. 2014). Data-papers & gap-analysis In order to improve the dissemination and citation of Fauna Europaea and to increase the acknowledge of the Fauna Europaea contributors, a special Biodiversity Data Journal Series has been compiled using novel e-Publishing tools, called Contributions on Fauna Europaea, preparing data-papers of all major Fauna Europaea taxonomic groups. This work was initiated during the ViBRANT project and is further supported by the recently Fauna Europaea: Annelida – Hirudinea, incl. Acanthobdellea and Branchiobdellea + started EU BON project. This contribution represents the first publication of the Fauna Europaea Annelida–Hirudinea data sector as a BDJ data paper. In the EU BON project (Hoffmann et al. 2014) also further steps will be made on implementing Fauna Europaea as a basic tool for biodiversity research and for taxonomic expertise evaluation and management in Europe, using Fauna Europaea as a standard reference for taxonomic Information. The Fauna Europaea data-papers will contribute to a quality assessement on biodiversity data by providing estimates on gaps in taxonomic information and knowledge (see Table 1). Table 1. Responsible specialists per family in Annelida–Hirudinea. FAMILY NUMBER OF SPECIES IN FAEU (in brackets, SPECIALIST(S) estimated actual number of existing species) Acanthobdellidae 1 (1) Alessandro Minelli, Boris Sket Branchiobdellidae 9 (9) Alessandro Minelli, Boris Sket Cambarincolidae 1 (1) Alessandro Minelli, Boris Sket Erpobdellidae 32 (~42) Alessandro Minelli, Boris Sket Glossiphoniidae 18 (~20) Alessandro Minelli, Boris Sket Haemopidae 2 (2) Alessandro Minelli, Boris Sket Hirudinidae 5 (5) Alessandro Minelli, Boris Sket Piscicolidae 27 (~29) Alessandro Minelli, Boris Sket Xerobdellidae 3 (3) Alessandro Minelli, Boris Sket General description Purpose: Fauna Europaea is a database of the scientific names and distribution of all living, currently known European land and fresh-water animal species assembled by a large network of experts. An extended description of the Fauna Europaea project can be found in Jong et al. 2014. A summary is given in the sections below. The Annelida–Hirudinea, together with their allies Acanthobdellea and Branchiobdellea, are one of the 58 Fauna Europaea major taxonomic groups, covering 98 species (Fig. 2). The data were acquired and checked by two specialists (Tables 1, 2). 4 Minelli A et al. Table 2. Responsible associated specialists in Annelida–Hirudinea. GROUP or AREA SPECIALIST(S) Hirudinidae Serge Utevsky Eastern European countries Serge Utevsky Addititional information: The Hirudinea or leeches form a quite small group of macrophagous or blood-sucking annelids, including about 680 species (Sket and Trontelj 2008), probably derived from a lineage of freshwater oligochaetes. Their presence in the sea, and in terrestrial habitats, is secondary, following a primary radiation in freshwater habitats. About 15% of the ca. 680 species described thus far (Sket and Trontelj 2008), including many representatives of the Piscicolidae and all members of the Ozobranchidae, are marine; ca. 100 species (all members of the Americobdellidae, Cylicobdellidae, Haemadipsidae, Xerobdellidae, a few Hirudinidae and one member of the Salifidae) are terrestrial or semiterrestrial, all the remaining Hirudinea live in freshwater habitats. Three main feeding